Re:Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain
by cm2187 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @04:01AM
(#16929858)
Having one party to run the system wouldn’t need a block chain, just transparency. Make the data public, available to everyone, with daily hashes of the data of the day combined with the hash from the previous day. Sign that hash+date to prove it has been computed by this central party alone. If the hash cannot be recomputed then there is proof the data has been tempered with. All other parties need to do is to download and store these daily hashes in case of a conflict.
But all of that would be vastly simpler with a central trusted third party.
Re:Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain
by noddy1 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @04:18AM
(#16929966)
Global supply chains involve a number of superpowers who are at proxy wars with each other and a vast number of countries of which the majority have deep corruption issues. Who do you designate as the trusted 3rd party?
Re:Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain
by cm2187 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @04:41AM
(#16930106)
A company that has no skin in the game and which business it is to be a trusted third party. One of the big audit companies would be my first thought. But there are many businesses that play this role (exchanges, clearing houses, etc).
At the end the job is technically quite simple. Maintaining a semi-public database. It's pretty black or white.
Re:Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain
by noddy1 on Thursday April 26, 2018 @06:07AM
(#16930490)
How do you account for rogue employees or hacks at the trusted 3rd party?
Equifax was a trusted 3rd party with no skin in the game.
Facebook was too (at least it was trusted by the west, the chinese never trusted it).
It has copy on its site stating it "allows multiple different parties to securely interact with the same universal source of truth."
I think the fact that IBM is running this, and not Walmart, is actually a plus. The suppliers don't have to worry about Walmart itself making data changes. Of course the details will vary, but I highly doubt the platform allows the account owner to unilaterally make changes to this source of truth. It's totally against the point of the project.